#nor is my decision to avoid antidepressants morally superior to the decision to use antidepressants

[rotationalsymmetry]

hey, i just wanted to say i appreciate your thoughts on sexuality and gender! re: a post you made a while back-- it's understandable to wrestle with the implications of wanting to change part of your body but i think that exercising one's bodily autonomy and breaking norms associated with one's assigned gender are like, totally defensible. also, i want to push back against the idea of a natural/unmodified body. 1/2

2/2 a combo of social forces and individual choice shapes everyone's gender embodiment and presentation. the way you learned to talk in a "feminine" register was likely a product of that originally-- in a descriptive sense, there's no "default/neutral" state because we're social beings in an advanced technological world. in a normative sense, why is an unmodified body an ideal? what makes it more valuable than a body which hasn't been altered? that's my two cents about this complex topic

Thanks anon! (General note: please going forward can people sending me mail responding to posts I've made link to those posts or copy a phrase from them so they're easy to find again or something? It's been over a month since I checked my messages/asks, it'll be over a month again some time in the future, my memory is not that good.) Love this note, it's taking me some time to process it, I do think you've got some great points about "natural" being kind of a made up concept here. And there are many ways in which my body is already not unmodified: I got braces for one, that's a modification. And if I lived somewhere where everyone went barefoot, the soles of my feet would be a lot tougher. So I guess wearing shoes also creates a modified body. Or maybe not wearing shoes creates a modified body. Hard to say which. And goodness knows I'm appreciative of vaccines (unnatural) and glasses (unnatural) and the internet (extremely unnatural). And I do have a certain amount of "natural = better" (that somehow doesn't catch socially normative things like braces and glasses) that could use more examining. One minor thing: it sounds like you're saying that whether someone's voice is high or low doesn't have a biological component (or maybe can't be proved to have a biological component), is that right? That's very confusing to me, because when people go through a testosterone-based puberty, their voice breaks. That's a thing you can observe happen, either through science or through your personal lived experience.

And...I think you're wrong about "descriptively, there is no default state". That sounds like there isn't really a difference between doing a thing with the intention of altering my body and not doing that, and, well...obviously there's a difference, yeah? I can't change the way society and my environment are affecting me, but what's that got to do with HRT? It's very cool to question which things are nature and which things are societal, and it's also good for that questioning to have a reality-checking component. Anyways, in case there was any confusion over this, I don't think my decision to not medically transition is in any way morally superior to the decisions of people who do medically transition, and transitioning should be way, way more accessible than it is.